Emeriti Faculty

Kaut

I am retired from active participation in the daily doings of the department. I have been spending most of my time since 1993 living on the White Mountain Apache Reservation (Fort Apache) in central eastern Arizona. I am associated with the tribal adult education center there as a consultant and still maintain a living site with research and writing facilities on a quarter acre lot provided by tribe. When I am there I am available via E-mail on a daily basis.

Khare

A socio-cultural anthropologist, I am interested in comparative studies of diverse cultural traditions, social inequalities, and political-national modernity and globalism found among the social elite as well as the Subaltern groups engaged in social identity and justice movements. Starting with contemporary India, my transnational discussions expand, implicitly or explicitly, into discussing the modern “Western, European or American” value systems and social life ways.

Plog

My research focuses on culture change in the prehistoric American Southwest, particularly the changing nature of ritual and social organization from approximately A.D. 800 to the present. My recent focus has been on the Chaco Canyon region of northwestern New Mexico, perhaps the most important center of the Pueblo world in the 11th and 12th centuries. I address what I believe are key aspects of organization, ritual and cosmology during the Chacoan era.

Contini-Morava

I had an early childhood fantasy that my unique brain wave configuration made me the only person on Earth who would be able to communicate with the space aliens I hoped would show up. Later I became interested in human languages, but I resisted learning my father’s native language, Italian, until our family moved to Somalia when I was 12 and it turned out that the only middle school in Mogadishu was Italian. There I also studied Latin and Arabic, and for fun I attended Russian classes that were run by the Soviet embassy for Somalis en route to study in the USSR. I didn

Hantman

My research in archaeology is concerned with the writing of anthropological histories of Native American societies. I focus on the writing of long-term regional histories, with a particular interest in the intersection of indigenous worldviews and the events of the early colonial era. I am equally concerned with changing relations within and between indigenous peoples at this time.

Douglass

Most of my work in socio-cultural anthropology has been in Spain. Before I began graduate school in symbolic anthropology, I had lived in Spain for eight years. This early experience with Spain, especially Barcelona, complemented my later field work there. My first book, Bulls, Bullfighting and Spanish Identities (University of Arizona Press, 1997), used bullfighting as a vehicle to explore the many Spanish national and local identities as made manifest through patron saint festivals, the main context for bullfights and other taurine spectacles.

McKinnon

As a cultural anthropologist, my research and writing have long been focused on issues relating to kinship, marriage, and gender. I am fascinated by their cross-cultural and historical diversity, by their centrality in the structures and dynamics of hierarchy and equality, and by the way scientific texts have transformed their culturally specific manifestations into universal facts of nature.

Metcalf

Before coming to the United States, I worked at the Universities of Singapore and Papua New Guinea, and conducted research in both of those countries. But most of what I now write and teach is motivated by the experience of living in longhouse communities in Borneo in the 1970's. It was the beginning of a period of rapid change; most obviously, the integrity of traditional world views were challenged by conversion to Christianity. Thinking about that led me into a century-old tradition of comparative religion in anthropology, which places emphasis on ritual.

Sapir

West African languages, folklore and culture. My initial field work was with the language and folklore of the Kujamaat Jóola of Southern Sénégal. Subsequent field work investigated their social organization and social symbolism. Language, folklore and social symbolism center on symbolism in general and inform my broader theoretical interests, the central place of symbolism in human thought.

Ross

I consider teaching, advising and mentoring students in anthropology and linguistics to be central to my life. I particularly enjoy introducing students to new ideas and concepts and showing them the relevance of anthropological and linguistic ideas and approaches to other aspects of their lives. Perhaps this is a result of my own experience and training. Starting out as an archeology student at the University of Nebraska, I was quickly immersed in a four-fields approach to anthropology by an exciting teaching staff.